A.Word.A.Day --tenebrous

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Jun 15, 2015

This week’s theme
Random words

This week’s words
tenebrous
swidden
turbid
prolegomenon
fructuous

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A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

We can get a random number by throwing a pair of dice. We can get a random answer to a yes/no question by tossing a coin. But beyond these trivial things, randomness is a serious business. When a lottery winner is picked you want to make sure that the number picked is truly random. As the mathematician Robert Coveyou once said, “Random number generation is too important to be left to chance.”

Well, this week’s words are randomly chosen. Not truly at random, because out of half a million words in the English language that method may give us words that aren’t very interesting. Also, choosing words truly at random would mean that sometimes the same word may appear twice (or more often). But these words are random in the sense that there isn’t a unifying theme connecting them.

And if you need more words beyond what are featured this week, visit the web page on our website that shows a random word picked from words previously featured in A.Word.A.Day. Again, these words are selected using a pseudo random number generator, so don’t use them for divination or for life’s big decisions (Should I marry him?).

tenebrous

PRONUNCIATION:

(TEN-uh-bruhs)

MEANING:

adjective: Dark, gloomy, or obscure.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Old French tenebreus, from Latin tenebrosus (dark), from tenebrae (darkness). Earliest documented use: 1420.

USAGE:

“By its very nature rather tenebrous, undercover intelligence gathering blurs the lines between procedure and actual process, making it a difficult area to monitor and regulate.”
Sarah Vine; Radio Choice; The Times (London, UK); Sep 29, 2012.

See more usage examples of tenebrous in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

To a father growing old, nothing is dearer than a daughter. -Euripides, playwright (c. 480-406 BCE)

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